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Expressive Individualism: The Secular Creed's Article on the Self

Rev. C•D•F• Warrington, M.Div.
By Rev. C•D•F• Warrington, M.Div.

Ordained Minister, M.Div.

July 6, 2026

3 min read

theology
A solitary figure at a crossroads between a mirror and a distant light on the horizon

Every creed has an article on the self — an answer to who the human person is and what gives life meaning. The Apostles' Creed answers: you are a creature made by God, redeemed by Christ, indwelt by the Spirit, and destined for resurrection. The secular creed's answer is different: you are the author of your own identity, and your highest obligation is to express and actualize who you truly are inside.

Philosopher Charles Taylor calls this moral framework 'expressive individualism,' and it is arguably the dominant anthropology of contemporary Western culture. Each person has a unique inner core — a set of feelings, desires, and orientations that define who they really are. External constraints — family expectations, religious norms, social conventions — are threats to authenticity. The good life consists in discovering one's inner truth and expressing it outwardly, regardless of what tradition or community demands.

Expressive individualism shapes nearly every major cultural controversy of our era. The sexual revolution was in large part a campaign for the right to express inner desires without moral or social censure. The ongoing debates about gender identity rest on the premise that the authentic self is located in inner feelings rather than in embodied nature. The therapeutic culture — the language of 'finding yourself,' 'living your truth,' and 'being authentic' — is the pastoral expression of expressive individualism.

Christians must engage this vision with both clarity and charity. Clarity, because expressive individualism is not a neutral anthropology — it is a rival creed that makes claims about human nature, freedom, and flourishing that directly contradict the Christian account. The Bible does not locate the true self in unconstrained inner desire; it locates it in relationship to God. We are not autonomous self-creators; we are creatures made in the image of God, fallen into sin, and redeemable only through grace.

Charity, because expressive individualism often resonates in people's lives because it speaks to genuine needs — for dignity, for recognition, for freedom from external shame and oppression. The church must not simply react against these longings but offer a better answer to them. Christian anthropology grounds individual worth in something more stable than inner feeling — in the image of God and the love of Christ. The freedom the gospel offers is not freedom to become whatever you imagine yourself to be, but freedom from the bondage of sin and the gift of becoming who God made you to be.

'Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it,' Jesus said (Matthew 16:25). This is a radically counter-cultural claim. It insists that the deepest self is not found by looking inward but by dying to self and being raised in Christ. That is the article the Christian creed has always confessed about the self, and it is as urgently needed now as it has ever been.

Tags:theologychurch history

Frequently Asked Questions

What is expressive individualism and how does it function as a secular creed?

Expressive individualism is the belief that the core of personhood is an inner authentic self that must be freely expressed and affirmed by society, regardless of external moral, social, or religious norms. Philosopher Charles Taylor, who coined the term in 'Sources of the Self' (1989) and 'A Secular Age' (2007), identified it as the dominant moral framework of modern Western culture. It functions as a secular creed because it generates binding moral claims—that self-expression is sacred, that constraint is oppression, and that identity is self-defined—with the same force of conviction that religious creeds have.

How does expressive individualism conflict with Christian anthropology?

Christian anthropology holds that human identity is received rather than constructed—humans are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) and find their true self in relation to their Creator and in community with others, not in autonomous self-expression. Where expressive individualism posits that the inner self is the source and judge of moral truth, Christianity teaches that the heart is 'deceitful above all things' (Jeremiah 17:9) and requires transformation by grace. The Christian vision of the self is thus fundamentally relational and dependent rather than self-defining and sovereign.

Who are the major thinkers that shaped the secular creed of expressive individualism?

Expressive individualism draws on intellectual tributaries from Rousseau's belief in the natural goodness of uncorrupted human feeling, Romanticism's valorization of authentic self-expression over social convention, and Freudian psychology's framework of repression and liberation. In the twentieth century, Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs (culminating in 'self-actualization') and Carl Rogers's client-centered therapy gave expressive individualism a therapeutic vocabulary. Philip Rieff's 'The Triumph of the Therapeutic' (1966) and Robert Bellah's 'Habits of the Heart' (1985) were early sociological analyses of its cultural dominance.

How does Rebecca McLaughlin's or Carl Trueman's analysis describe the secular creed?

Carl Trueman's 'The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self' (2020) provides the most comprehensive recent genealogy of expressive individualism, tracing its roots through Rousseau, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, and Freud to show how 'psychological man' replaced older conceptions of the self grounded in nature, tradition, or God. Trueman argues that sexual revolution and identity politics are downstream of this deeper philosophical revolution about what the self is. His follow-up 'Strange New World' (2022) offers an accessible version of the same argument for general readers.

What does the Christian tradition offer as an alternative to expressive individualism's account of the self?

Christianity offers what might be called a 'received self'—identity grounded in being known and named by God before self-awareness, rooted in baptismal identity (Galatians 3:27), and shaped by participation in the body of Christ. Augustine's Confessions modeled a different kind of self-discovery: not into the depths of one's autonomous desires but toward the God 'in whom our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.' Christian spiritual formation, rather than celebrating the unformed self, classically involves mortification of disordered desires and renewal into the image of Christ (Romans 12:2).

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